Friday 11 December 2009 18.03 EST
First published on Friday 11 December 2009 18.03 EST

The informal "call me Tony" era in Whitehall, when senior civil servants and ministers addressed each other by their Christian names, is to end.

In a return to the Whitehall traditions lampooned in the 1980s television comedy Yes Minister, Britain's most senior mandarin has ordered all civil servants to refer to ministers by their formal titles after the general election.

Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, has said that new members of the cabinet should be greeted as "secretary of state" when they take up their posts.

Middle ranking and junior ministers will simply be called "minister". Should a minister ask to be called by their first name, they can expect an echo of the response the fictional Jim Hacker received from his permanent secretary in the BBC comedy series. "Yes minister," Sir Humphrey Appleby replied to Hacker's request to call him Jim.

O'Donnell issued his edict in a meeting with Whitehall mandarins as part of his preparations for an expected change of government after the general election. As a canny Whitehall veteran who made his name serving John Major in No 10 and Gordon Brown in the Treasury, O'Donnell was careful not to say the change was being introduced to keep the Tories happy.

He simply told the Whitehall meeting that the election provided a chance, after 13 years of rule by New Labour, to restore the traditional distance between ministers and their officials.

One Whitehall source said of the meeting: "We are to revert after the election to calling ministers secretary of state, first secretary or whatever their title is. Gus feels it is important to create a degree of separation. He wants to show that there is a real separation of roles between ministers and officials. It is natural when one government has been in power for so long that ministers and officials become close. Gus feels we need to guard against that."

The O'Donnell ruling would end the practice adopted when Tony Blair issued his famous "call me Tony" instruction in 1997. Officials show their status by referring to the most senior members of the cabinet by their first name. So, in the last year, Peter has put the government back on its feet after he decided to rescue Gordon, who was too reliant on Ed, who was gunning for Alistair's job – so goes the script among mandarins. In future, officials would say the first secretary of state has rescued the prime minister, who was too reliant on the schools secretary, who had his eye on the chancellor's job.